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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24968083">until you sing along</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09'>piggy09</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Midsommar (2019)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Gen</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-06-29</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-06-29</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 11:15:33</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,344</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24968083</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>The Hårga care for Dani.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>36</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>until you sing along</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>HAPPY BIRTHDAY CAM! I rewatched Midsommar before writing this and hm. your best girl sure does suffer a lot huh</p><p>[content warnings for unhealthy possessive behavior]</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Dani screams. Dani cries. We are trying to understand. Inside of her gown of flowers – her cloak – there is only the screaming harsh agony of her, the unrelenting pain of her. When flowers are not allowed to grow, they turn inwards; they consume themselves and melt into unreachable sweetness. If you want it, you have to crawl inside. If you want it, you have to crawl inside. We are trying to understand. Dani, smiling, weeping, beautiful: we are trying to understand.</p><p>We take the flowers from her hair and from her skin, and all that is left is Dani: hollow-eyed, teary-eyed, gray- or brown- or blue-eyed depending on the light. We are trying to understand; we pour the summer light over her in buckets. The sweet hot sun changes her eyes to the color of the soil and then the color of the sky again. We love her; we have only just begun to know her; we have always known her. She is unknowable. We are trying to understand: the smoke billowing in the air, and also the smoke billowing in Dani’s eyes. Some of us have never known smoke like this. Some of us have seen it before, but only in memories so faded they are hardly real. They are hardly real. The smoke in Dani’s eyes: we are trying to</p><p>understand, and she is trying to understand us too. She asks us questions.</p><p>
  <em>What now? </em>
</p><p>What is <em>n</em><em>ow</em>, really, but a series of dead instants.</p><p>
  <em>Where do I go? </em>
</p><p>Why must she go anywhere?</p><p>
  <em>What’s going on?</em>
</p><p>What’s going on. What is going on, we are trying to understand.</p><p>An apple is a flower first before it is an apple. The bee crawls inside of the flower and brings the pollen in, and the apple grows inside of the flower – swelling, pulsing, shuddering. The ovaries of the flower expand in hungry throbs. The petals are the first to go, and once they go they are gone, and once they grow they are eaten, by us, and we are hungry for them. Our teeth piercing the sweet white meat of them. Dani? Dani? Do you understand? The sweetness of the flower turned inwards? The way we rip the petals open with our teeth?</p><p><em>I don’t understand. I don’t understand. </em>She’s lying; we know this, we love her. We touch the petal-soft skin of her face. We take her hair down from its braids. We wipe the tears and mucus from her, carefully, cautiously. An apple is a flower first. The apple grows and then we eat it. The song begins and then we sing it. We love Dani and then we know her, we know her and then we love her, we love her and then we love her. <em>What now? </em>Please understand, Dani, that this is the <em>now</em>. The <em>now</em> is an infinity of small moments where we take care of you. Open your mouth and we will bring the pollen in. The flesh of you will swell open with sweetness and sun. There will never be anything else. There will never be anything else. There will never be anything else, ever again, if you will only open up your mouth and let us crawl inside.</p><p>We have imagined this for years, and also days, and also a constant chain of untouchable <em>now</em>s. We have thought about her lying next to us at night; we have thought about the snuffling of her breathing, the way that her sleeping breaths could roll smooth and liquid with the right herbs and seeds and medicines. We have thought about her belly swelling outward with a child. We have thought about wrapping her hair around our fingers and pulling until our fingers starve themselves of blood for her. We have thought about her smile. We have thought about her hands. We have thought about the screaming pain at the center of her, and how it would taste in our mouths; we have thought about her screaming pain, and we have carried it for her in our mouths. The bitter taste of it. The way it sat heavy in our mouths like meat – and, like meat, fortified us when swallowed. We have carried her pain inside of us and it has filled up our blood and strengthened our bones and we love her, we love her, we love her, we have her inside of us, she has us inside of her. We will care for her forever. We will never stop trying</p><p>to understand her. Nobody has known how to care for her – not the demon we left in the ashes, not her parents (dead) or her sister (dead) or the thousands of callous hands that have passed by her without meaning. We fill our hands to the brim with meaning for her, so she knows. We sit her down like a child. We wash her feet, her tender feet. We take her gown from her and put a new one on (white) (soft). We brush the smoke out of her hair.</p><p>Dani, when is the last time someone did this for you? Dani, think about it – think about the last time you were held, and realize that it was here and it was us who held you. Tip your head back – yes, like that – and bare the applemeat of your throat to us, and remember that the smoke vanished into the blue sky when you watched it. The smoke vanished into your blue eyes when you watched it (they were blue). Remember how it hurt and then was gone? Your mouth opening like flower petals; we reach inside of it, we leave our secrets there. We feed you the very best food the earth will give us, and you unravel for us. We cradle your skull in our hands. We stroke your aching temples. We watch you, carefully, lovingly (we are trying to understand), as you shed petals second by shivering second. The May Queen inside of you swells and ripens. In the black of your eyes, Dani, she is already blooming.</p><p>We look at each other, our eyes all gray and brown and blue (depending on the light), and we know that each and every one of us is dreaming of the next summer. Not that we do not love the winter – we do, in all of its cold and cruelty – but we are already aching for the next summer and how it will be gold and stickysweet with honey. The ashes we have scattered will make the trees grow back even greener. The chickens will be ripe enough to kill. Dani will be with us. Her hands (so soft!) will be callused in our beloved familiar ways; she will sleep with us eat with us breathe with us dream with us sit with us, close to us, our fingers in her hair. Our fingers inside of her. The gold of the pollen, the way that it blooms.</p><p>Next summer, we will say <em>Dani </em>and it will mean loving and being loved. Dani, loved, will have forgotten by then. She will have forgotten that the word <em>Dani</em> ever meant anything else; she will forget that it was ever said by anyone else. The pain will fall from her. When she says her own name, it will fill up her mouth and bulge against her teeth. The love of it. The love of it will fill her up so much she won’t be able to breathe.</p><p>She doesn’t know this yet, which breaks our hearts. Her eyes are glazed and her mouth is turned down at the corners; her hands are limp and curled in her lap. Soft, lifeless. Like petals clinging desperately to a fruit that they no longer understand. She leans into our touch. She understands. At least, she wants to understand. We understand too; that is why we touch her.</p><p>Dani is still crying, so we cry too. Our tears water her.</p><p><em>I want to go home</em>, she says, <em>I want to go home</em>, so we listen. We take her there.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>You are so beautiful to us!<br/>We want to lock you in our house<br/>We want to feed you with our spoon<br/>We want to make you sing along</p><p>Sing along to songs you don't know<br/>And you'll never know<br/>Until you sing along<br/>--"Sing Along," múm</p></blockquote></div></div>
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